UPA wins two Rajya Sabha seats from Jharkhand

Ranchi, June 20 (IANS) Jharkhand’s ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Saturday won in by-elections both Rajya Sabha seats from the state, beating the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Dheeraj Sahu of the Congress got 44 votes against the BJP’s Anup Agrawal, who managed to get only 26 votes.

The Jharkhand assembly has 82 legislators but its current effective strength is 73. Members of state legislatures constitute the electoral college for elections to the Rajya Sabha.

Two legislators - Vinod Singh of Communist Party of India- Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML) and Aparna Sen Gupta of the Forward Block (FB) - did not cast their votes.

One vote was found invalid in the fight between Dheeraj Sahu and Anup Agrawal.

The by-election for both seats took place separately and legislators cast two votes each.

The results indicate that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) failed to keep its flock together. The BJP and its ally Janata Dal-United (JD-U) have 24 and four legislators respectively.

The two seats in the upper house fell vacant after former external minister and senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha was elected to the Lok Sabha from Hazaribagh in Jharkhand and Digvijay Singh of the JD-U quit his membership to fight the Lok Sabha election as an Independent candidate from Banka of Bihar. He won the election.